Heather McGhee

Recent Articles

( Demos.org ) But then again, there’d be the EPA and the Clean Water Act to thank for the waterways; local officials to thank for the zoning; federal transportation dollars to thank for the roads driven to enter the course ... You get the point. My colleagues at Dēmos have a piece up today as part of a week-long series called "Taxes Matter." It includes an annotated Tea Party protest photo, and it calls out how hypocritical it is for anti-tax zealots to ignore what taxes bring us. Here's an excerpt from Dēmos Vice President Tamara Draut : We don’t have to love paying taxes, but we should at a minimum respect and acknowledge why we pay them. Yet without a single drop of irony, Tea Party members hold up their 'Zero Taxes' posters on street curbs maintained with local government funding, lit with publicly-funded street lights, in front of public traffic signs, near publicly-maintained roads to protest efforts to fund our public goods. (Heather McGhee is director of the Washington office...

In theory, financial reform should dismantle the same deregulated system that produced toxic credit-default swaps and toxic credit cards. But on every aspect of financial reform except perhaps for basic consumer protection, the necessary structural reforms won't be passed in 2010. If the greatest financial-market meltdown in history couldn't spur deep, structural reform, what will? The battle-within-a-battle for consumer protection offers some clues. A new federal regulator dedicated solely to keeping unfair and deceptive financial products out of Americans' hands was what the advocacy community wanted and, more or less, got. What advocates didn't get has filled the pages of this special report. Why was consumer protection so different? Partly, it's not quite as opaque as Wall Street's insider stock-in-trade. Derivatives, proprietary trading, off--balance-sheet reporting, hedge-fund regulation, and the like aren't exactly the stuff of kitchen-table conversations. Even so, when polled...